SoftwareMaven

Golden age of quantum computing research. That's a very different thing from a golden age of quantum computing.

What Bruce Willis brings to the table is this idealized version of what "man" is supposed to mean. So, on the one hand, we have an image of men as socially retarded incompetents and on the other hand, we have an image of men as unkillable tough guys. Where is a 15 year old supposed to land in there?

1. I actually really enjoyed the first five or so seasons of BBT, before they started playing more and more to the cheap "socially retarded scientists" jokes. I also believe they aren't making lives better for intellectual young women, either, who need the role models more than anyone.

As a society, we need to come to terms with masculinity. That means men need to be able to be masculine without being domineering and without being castigated.

The law needs to reflect society's expectations because most people are not criminals by the default of having laws reflect what is normal in society. Break that, and you end up with people not caring about any laws ("in for a penny, in for a pound", and all that). In this case, the Third Party Doctrine fails miserably (but then, so do a lot of other laws).

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/10/08/annika-eriksson-swe...

Further, these are medical records. You know, things that we all get HIPAA notices for every time we go to a doctor. I have to go through a pain in the ass process every time I want to get two of my own doctors to talk. Police could just bypass that, without any probable cause (Feds still can).

Phone record searches require probable cause. Financial and personal records require probable cause. Prescription records? Wide open to the police to comb through any time they like.

As a person who has had different controlled substances prescribed by three doctors this year, this is frightening as hell.

As for Mr. Pyle, "Firefighter Ryan Pyle had also been dealing with chronic back pain, and after a five-day stint in the hospital for an infected tooth, was also prescribed painkillers on several occasions. Police saw these prescriptions in the database and charged Pyle with one felony count."[1]

The assumption of guilty until proven innocent (and he must be guilty if the police were looking at him, right?) is revolting. The ability of police to peruse records at a whim and destroy people's lives is even more so.

1. http://www.kutv.com/news/features/local-news/stories/Utah-39...

I'm sure it had nothing to do with his attorney filing an appeal, showing he was ready to fight a law that was far too lenient towards police access, which might get the law overturned and make other, easy convictions suddenly impossible to get.

The Third Party Doctrine needs to go.

That's what I thought, too, until a co-worker corrected me. Sky does have phone service, though[1].

1. http://www.sky.com/products/broadband-talk/talk/features/

Invariably, the ugliest code I've seen has always come from "we must move fast at the expense of everything else" startups. I worked at a startup that combined the worst of architectural temple building with the worst of "maintaining code is a Maserati problem" (e.g. by the time somebody has to maintain it, I'll be driving a Maserati and not caring). The company almost folded due to the weight of the code base preventing features from being released. Did I mention this was all Java?

Many fast-moving startups choose dynamic languages to do their ultra-fast, sloppy iterations on. Fast-moving startups tend to write code that is unmaintainable. Later in the lifecycle, as the maintenance nightmare hits, these same companies move to static languages to "fix their problem", but they've also introduced a lot more discipline in their engineering process. Afterwards, the dynamically typed language gets the blame for the lack of maintainability and the static language gets props for being maintainable.

Correlation is not causation. The engineering practice has far more to do with maintainability than the language itself. It just happens that, in the last 10 years, dynamic languages have been chosen more often during periods when companies write poor code. My Java example above was from 1998 to 2001 , when Java was the hot language for building the dotcom boom.

It is certainly a more difficult attack, but it doesn't seem like it's outside the realms of possibility for a state actor that funnels all content through one pipe. Am I overlooking something?

Given that, I have a very hard time trusting any drug that does not show amazingly stellar clinical trial results. If you have the options of cherry picking what you publish, and your drug only "helps" 50% of the participants, I see that as random noise.

Ben Goldacre[1] is trying to shine a spotlight on this, and is doing a pretty good job. His Ted Talk[2] is well worth watching.

1. http://www.badscience.net/

2. http://www.ted.com/talks/ben_goldacre_battling_bad_science

1. https://www.opensecrets.org/lobby/indusclient.php?id=B02

There's no need to replace anything. Nobody[1] uses domain names any more to browse the web. That's what Google, the default browser home page, and the omni-bar is for. I don't know a single non-web-developer who uses domain names. Everybody just drops "facebook" or "google"(?!) in the search box that shows up when the browser opens.

1. Well, nobody except for a rounding error number of people who hang out in places like HN.

1. This is not to say I don't practice waste reduction and energy conservation; just that I don't stress if something slips through the cracks.

2. http://www.eia.gov/forecasts/aeo/er/early_consumption.cfm

Except for those intangible benefits like reducing carbon footprints. I tend to feel guilty purchasing one-off small items and tend to group those purchases, even though I don't have to.

There is a mythos that everybody can just create and run their own startup, and the world can be fed on startups of O(1) size. I don't believe it (though I believe it can go a long way towards solving the problem), and, even if I did, startups still fail and people still need food, housing and warmth.

Governments don't have to take money from anyone to make this happen. They can just print it. Of course it amounts to the same thing, but everybody's money is dependent on the underlying financial system that is backed by governments (crypto-currencies are, slowly, making this less true).

I wonder how it would turn out if there was a single fund created to provide this living arrangement. Everybody is allowed to donate whatever they want to it (with no benefit other than knowing that they donated), then, any shortfall is met by printing the money, devaluing the currency in use equally for all.

I don't know that it's a good idea; it should be tested first, and, if it fails, we throw it out (unlike so many "big" ideas where, if and when it fails, the reason is always that "we didn't do it big enough, so we have to throw more at it"). The success criteria need to be well defined, but not politically motivated like so many ideas for providing for the poor. Like I said, I don't know how to get there from here.

My issue still is that these costs will only increase over time.

My argument is predicated on the idea that the cost of living will steadily decrease over time. If the cost of shipping approaches zero because everything can be JIT manufactured locally and the social interaction values of living in a city dwindle due to continually improved online interaction, the cost of living becomes food and shelter which don't need to be centralized in expensive cities.

Localized JIT manufacturing is going to massively upset the global economy. I don't see a way out short of massive government efforts to prevent technological progress (which I expect to see), but technology will march forward anyway. Is it better to move towards a new economic model that accounts for it or just deal with the revolution when 75% of people are unemployed?

The biggest risk factor, IMO, is cost of energy. We need it to be going down significantly, because it will take cheap energy to drive the JIT manufacturing that enables a very inexpensive minimum cost of living. I really do think we are in a race between a social collapse due to unemployment, hunger, and social disparity and copious free energy. And I think social collapse is currently winning, so if we could hold that off for a bit, both through reducing social unease and increasing funding in energy research, I'd really be OK with that.

The single worst thing you can do for someone disadvantaged is to give them a reason to stay exactly where they are in life (and no incentive to succeed at something more). A basic income does exactly this.

No, the single worst thing you can do is let them starve or freeze to death, because then their one and only life is over. And that literally happens to poor people. I consider this argument the "the poor are only poor because they are lazy, so anything that makes them more lazy will only make them worse" argument. And I believe it is a lazy argument in itself.

I've scrounged through cupboards hoping there was anything in them while my parents drank away whatever money they got. I get the potential negatives better than most people around here. But I also know that there are a lot of people who were just not fortunate to be born in the right place to the right parents with the right opportunities right in front of them.

I went to school and to college, paid for by the tax payer mostly, because I worked hard (actually, most people in the US went to college mostly paid for by the tax payer, regardless of how hard they worked). Should I have been told to piss off because my parents couldn't pay for me to go to college? I had a high school diploma, so I had "enough", right?

Where do you draw the line? How do you determine who is good enough and who isn't? All I'm saying is the answer to the first question is no, I shouldn't have (I've provided far more value than I cost) and the answer to the rest is it is a waste of time to even try to answer them.

I prefer a minimum living stipend for a few reasons: It doesn't treat the poor like they are too stupid or too criminal to manage their own lives and their own money. It allows people the ability to move to more fulfilling (and more lucrative) employment by providing time for training. It protects kids without trying to transition parenting responsibility to the state. In general, it keeps the state out of people's lives, increasing their dignity.

Yes, there will still be homeless people. There will be people who squander the money. But there will be many who take advantage of it and build a better life for themselves and all of their posterity. And I prefer to bet on the general desire of people to better themselves.

The problem is I don't know how to get there from here.

1.http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/aug/22/monkey-bus...